Benjamin Péret: surrealism, automatons, Borges


It is not surprising, then, that the surrealists were entranced by Jaquet-Droz’s automaton known as The Writer, whose first written word was “merveilleux.” In Minotaure 3-4 (1933), the surrealist poet Benjamin Péret published the article “Au Paradis des Fantômes” on the history of surrealist objects that goes from automatic pieces of machinery dating from the seventeenth century up to the present: clocks in the shape of flying butterflies, automatons that sing opera arias, an automatic scarab, a pistol with a singing bird and watch, robots. Péret presents Jaquet-Droz’s mechanical writer as the creator of all languages and literatures, including that of his own creator, Jaquet-Droz: “He knows all the languages and teaches me everything I don’t know. He thinks and writes for me what I don’t dare to write. He dictates my thoughts” (“Au Paradis des Fantômes” 32). Published in 1933, this essay likely caught Borges’ eye, as we’ve seen he was a reader of Minotaure. This article alone could have contributed significantly to “The Circular Ruins” in which the dreamer discovers in the end that he too is the dream of his own creation, and relates as well to the idea of a totalizing language or consciousness that can have access to the entire possible literature ever, which is in the background of “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” “El Aleph,” “The Library of Babel,” and last but not least, to the idea of plagiarism as automatism of writing that is at the heart of “Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote.” To sum up the discussion of items “b” and “p” in relation to Breton’s “Introduction au discours sur le peu de réalité,” it is significant that in the discussion about the gnome-book as poetic creation Breton mentions automatons as mechanisms that allow for the apparition of the marvelous: “Absurd and highly developed automatons that would do everything like no one else, would be tasked with giving us a proper idea of action” (Point du jour 29).

SOURCE: Ungureanu, Delia. From Paris to Tlön: Surrealism as World Literature (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), p. 119.

Note also:

Péret, Benjamin. “Au Paradis des fantômes,” Minotaure, 3-4, 1934, pp.29-34. And:

Au Paradis des fantômes [[The Paradise of Phantoms], illustrated by Joan Miró, 1938. See also Librarie Faustroll.

Miro illus. for Peret


‘Marvellous!’ He wrote the word ‘Marvellous!’ The child uttering his first words says ‘Papa’ or ‘Mama’ but my automaton writes ‘Marvellous’ because that is what he knows himself to be.

— Benjamin Péret

SOURCE: Chalmers, Madeleine. “AI Narratives and the French Touch,” in Imagining AI: How the World Sees Intelligent Machines, edited by Stephen Cave and Kanta Dihal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), pp. 39-54; Péret, pp. 39-40 (heading 3.1 Introduction), 52. Péret quote at head of chapter (above). Fuller description on indicated pages.


Selected bibliography

AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking About Intelligent Machines, edited by Stephen Cave, Kanta Dihal, Sarah Dillon. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2020.

Chalmers, Madeleine. “Living as we Dream: Automatism and Automation from Surrealism to Stiegler,” Nottingham French Studies, Volume 59, Issue 3, December, 2020, pp. 368-383.

Costich, Julia Field. The Poetry of Change: A Study of the Surrealist Works of Benjamin Péret. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979.

The Custom-House of Desire: A Half-Century of Surrealist Stories, translated with an Introduction by J. H. Matthews. Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975. Benjamin Péret:

A Life Full of Interest, 239
A Very Fleeting Pleasure, 244
The Thaw, 247 -250.

Matthews, J. H. Benjamin Péret. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1975.

Péret, Benjamin. Death to the Pigs, and other Writings, translated by Rachel Stella and others; introduction by Rachel Stella. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988.

___________. From the Hidden Storehouse: Selected Poems, translated by Keith Hollaman, introduction by Charles Simic. Oberlin, OH : Oberlin College, 1981.

___________. The Leg of Lamb: Its Life and Works, translated by Marc Lowenthal. Cambridge, MA : New York: Wakefield Press, 2011.

___________. A Marvelous World: Poems, translated with an introduction by Elizabeth R. Jackson. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985. Bilingual ed.

Other links

Benjamin Péret - Wikipedia

L'Association des amis de Benjamin Péret


Peintres: Paul Klee, Joan Miró, Exil (A Paul Delvaux)
par Paul Eluard

La Sunvoranto (por Joan Miró) / The Sun-Devourer (for Joan Miró)
de/by Ralph Dumain

Salvador Dali on cybernetics
(with Alain Bosquet)

Surrealism: Selected Links

‘World Literature’: A Bibliography

Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), 1920-2021
Guide compiled by Ralph Dumain

Cybernetics & Artificial Intelligence: Ideology Critique

Marx and Marxism Web Guide


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